international

A court in Sweden has ruled that Mälardalen University must reimburse Connie Askenback, an American student who sued saying that the academic program in which she enrolled didn't meet promised standards,The Wall Street Journal reported. The university now owes the former student more than $20,000. The court noted that the Swedish Higher Education Authority had found numerous problems with the program.

ACT will not schedule a makeup date following the cancellation of its June 11 test administrations in Hong Kong and South Korea due to a leak of test materials.

“Unfortunately, due to the nature of the cancellation and the ongoing investigation, ACT is unable to offer a retest opportunity before the next scheduled administration in September,” Bryan Maach, ACT's vice president for strategic growth markets, said in a statement. “We deeply regret the inconvenience caused to so many students by those who were attempting to cheat.”

A University of Alabama student who recently studied abroad has the Zika virus, AL.com reported. Officials said they could not provide details on the student but noted that most people with the virus recover quickly. The university has notified all students who recently returned from Central and South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, and recommended testing for any experiencing symptoms. The virus has been linked to birth defects, and so exposure is considered particularly dangerous to women who are or plan to become pregnant.

A professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev was among those killed Wednesday when Palestinian gunmen attacked Tel Aviv’s Sarona Market, the university announced.

Michael Feige, 58, was a sociologist and anthropologist who specialized in Israeli society. His book Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories (Wayne State University Press, 2009) won the Association for Israel Studies’ Shapiro Prize for the best book in Israel studies in 2010.

A statement from Feige’s faculty colleagues and students at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism described Feige’s research as “always penetrating and invariably profound. He brought a unique perspective to the diverse topics he studied -- the shaping of Israeli collective memory; the place of archaeology in Israeli society and the meanings and implications of clashes over antiquities; the changing memory and commemoration of the Rabin assassination; the memory of the Yom Kippur War in Israel; and other subjects central to our understanding of Israeli society in the past five decades.”

The leader of the law college at Pakistan’s University of Balochistan, Amanullah Achakzai, was shot and killed on his way to work on Wednesday, the Lahore-based The Nationreported. Police said unidentified gunmen riding motorcycles opened fire on Achakzai’s vehicle; a motive had not immediately been established.

A Canadian university professor has been jailed in Iran after conducting research on women in the country, according to a report in The Globe and Mail, which cites the professor’s niece.

Homa Hoodfar, an anthropologist and professor at Montreal’s Concordia University, was reportedly detained on Monday and is being held in Tehran’s Evin Prison. She was in Iran to visit family and do academic research. Her academic interests include feminism and the role of women in Middle Eastern societies.

“We are unclear as to what the charges are,” Hoodfar’s niece, Amanda Ghahremani, told the Canadian Press. “[Hoodfar] is not an activist and she has never been political. She has never engaged in anything that could even be remotely be construed as any form of sedition or political activity in any way.”

Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stéphane Dion, said he has met with a member of Hoodfar’s family and is working to help her.

A new law in China would make cheating on the high-stakes national college entrance exam punishable by up to a seven-year jail sentence, The New York Times reported. Student and parent reaction to the law is mixed, with some praising it as a way to deter cheating and others believing that a seven-year jail sentence is too harsh. Human rights experts described the severity of the threatened punishment as worrisome.

Western Kentucky University has asked at least 25 of the 60 graduate students recruited recently from India to study computer science to leave because they do not meet program requirements, The New York Timesreported. The students were recruited through agents who were to be paid $2,000 per student, but only if the students remained for two semesters. Many of the students performed poorly once enrolled, and some professors believe that they never should have been admitted. The use of agents who are paid on commission per student is a controversial but growing practice in American higher education.

The Council of Graduate Schools on Monday released preliminary survey data on the number of applications international students have submitted to U.S. graduate schools for the fall.

Although the total number of fall 2016 international applications recorded among the responding institutions -- 591,104 -- represents a decline from last year’s preliminary application total of 676,484, the council cautioned this may be attributable to methodological changes and a lower survey response rate. A total of 345 institutions responded to the CGS survey this year, compared to 377 the year before, and CGS also pushed up the date by which it asked institutions to provide application data by two weeks, from Feb. 15 to Feb. 1.

This is the last year CGS plans to publish preliminary data on international student applications, although it will continue to publish data on final international application and enrollment numbers. CGS plans to publish its findings on final fall 2016 international application and enrollment numbers in early 2017.

“I expect that international enrollment is going to continue to grow at a pretty robust clip, as it has in the past, thanks in part to large numbers of students from China and India, but at the same time U.S. graduate institutions really need to continue to diversify the portfolio of students who come from different countries, other than China and India,” said Jeff Allum, CGS’s assistant vice president for research and policy analysis.

The preliminary data show that applications from China and India together account for 69.5 percent of all applications for U.S. graduate schools.

A Wall Street Journalanalysis of data from more than a dozen large U.S. public universities found higher rates of alleged cheating for international undergraduate students than for domestic undergraduate students. The universities reported 5.1 cases of alleged cheating for every 100 international students in the 2014-15 academic year, versus one case for every 100 domestic students.